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Thursday, October 21, 2010

The Journey

The Crafty Fox came to life in September as I was making my way to North London to sell my handmade jewellery at a craft fair. I had begun to look for selling opportunities at Christmas markets and was dismayed to find that September was already too late. The majority of markets were already booked up or charged premium prices. I also noticed that there was a lack of independant markets in South London and a lightbulb pinged above my head!

I decided there and then that the only thing to do was to put on my own market. I roped in my partner Stephan who spent years promoting club nights back in Dublin. He's also fairly nifty with spreadsheets so I thought that could be useful too!
We spent a couple of weeks throwing around ideas for the name (...this stage should never be rushed!!). Megafair, Foxy Craft, South London Crafts.....? The Crafty Fox soon emerged as a clear winner and it's already proved to be popular choice. The next step was to involve the wonderful James of Jimbob Art as there was really only one person who could drum up the perfect Crafty Fox at the drop of a hat. True to form, James set aside his plates for a day and created the very dapper Foxy.

Once in possession of The Crafty Fox there was no turning back. Giving the market an identity made it real and so my exitement and enthuaism for the project continued to grow. We were delighted to learn that Etsy were happy to sponsor us and it was very exciting to see the stall holder enquiries begin to roll in following a shout out by Amity in the Etsy UK newsletter.

It was really encouraging to see that there were lots of others who were in the same boat as me and were delighted to hear about The Crafty Fox. In the end, we had over twice as many applications as available stalls. This led to a fun but challenging X-factor style eliminitation. I never knew that so many people made fabric rabbits before!

So now the promotion begins in earnest and our challenge is to draw in as many shoppers as possible. If you are reading this, please help by telling your friends to come and join us at the Dogstar on 11th December for the ultimate Christmas shopping experience!

7 comments:

Hi Crafty Fox, like you I too have noticed the lack of South London Crafts & have recently launched my own blogg and twitter site, dedicated to South London crafts. It's new but check it out; http://twitter.com/SWCraftClub